Discovering the adversary, one day at a time

Jihad Next Door

September 30, 2011

Having watched Samir Khan - aka The Pest - since the beginning of his career in 2006, I'm sorry to see him go, but not because I cared about him. He and his online buddies pestered me and other(more) decent bloggers for years. In the process, they took what was a tiny, sleepy little corner of the English-language jihadi internet, and turned it into an industry of inane commentary and pointless domestic policy.

No, I can't gloat over his demise. The Pest was an American kid who abused the privilege of his citizenship and the gift of his free will. He died as a consequence.

My thoughts are with his parents, who had to watch their child die a violent, ugly death, as the entire world celebrated.

June 06, 2011

Since 2003, Northern Virginia has been the locale for several prominent counter-terror arrests. Specifically, suspects from Fairfax and Alexandria Counties have been arrested in various schemes and plots, including two groups of young men - the Virginia Jihad Network and the Pakistan Five. Fairfax and Alexandria Counties are adjacent, sprawling multi-cultural suburbs of Washington, DC that taken together stretch from the Potomac River to Dulles International Airport. I live here -- walking distance from the famous Dar al-Hijrah mosque -- and can attest to the deeply complex social and cultural characteristics of both counties.

Fairfax County demographers publish an annual survey of the county, and it offers a glimpse into the deep challenge for sociologists study radicalization in the area. With a median household income of $102,449, and Asians representing the largest minority population, Fairfax County's demography is in stark contrast to the mostly homogeneous ghettos of Europe's Muslim (mostly North African) immigrants.

What does this mean to counter-jihad studies? Briefly, it means that objective social and demographic data is insufficient to describe the influences that lead individuals toward Salafist-jihadi-inspired violence. It can't be pat answers like "poverty" or "despair," because the socio-cultural environments from which jihadis come are as varied as they are.

I'm now convinced that all jihad is essentially local, because it is essentially personal.

February 18, 2011

A few of my law enforcement readers may find this interesting. It's a directory of "Muslim and Muslim-related Media in the United States." I'm making no analytical determination about any of the groups or individuals on this list. I'll leave that to you. However, I believe some of the sources listed are legitimate, mainstream operations. Others, eh, not so much.

Militant groups often place a lot of legitimate emphasis on their media and communication functions. Sometimes media operations are directed toward legitimate, sincere dawah functions. And sometimes media ops play the important role of providing a patina of legitimacy to otherwise shell organizations used to direct money to militants overseas. Sometimes, it's both.

The Journal of Islamic Law published the list in 1997. As I noted last month the Journal was the brain child of an Islamist working out of Takoma Park, Maryland in the 1990s. My guess is that there are no hippy dippy Sufi sources on the list, or Shia for that matter. Rather it's a list of mainstream and Islamist media, representing a few savory data breadcrumbs that could help shed more light onto the pre-9/11 Islamist networks in the United States.

January 31, 2011

Published in 1996, the excerpt of the following article calls for the implemention of shariah into community arbitration services as a means of "improving" the current legal system in the United States. Today it offers a fascinating peek into the pre-9/11 mindset of an American Islamist: "The time to begin conceptualizing our social and judicial institutions is now." The United States and Canada appear to offer endless opportunities for future implementation of Islamic law.

The article, "Community-Based Arbitration as a Vehicle for Implementing Islamic Law in the United States," begins with the premise that

we must not be content to cling to the predominate legal system, as it continues to slowly lapse deeper into semi-paralysis, choking on its own obstructive litigiousness…Through mediation and arbitration, the Muslim community may be able to design and implement a modified system of justice that would be responsive to its concern and the might evolve into a more comprehensive one in the future.

And then goes on to offer a method of employing community arbitration services as a means of introducing Shariah into the current legal system which the authors describe through analogy as "atrophying."

The article appears in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of The Journal of Islamic Law, a quarterly published through the Takoma Park, MD-based non-profit called the Institute for Intercultural Relations. Sometime after 2000, the title changed to The Journal of Islamic Law and Culture, and it appears to have stopped publication after 2004, only to restart in 2008 as a monthly, and only to vanish again after an October 2009 issue.

Information on the Institute is more elusive than the publication. Originally operating in Takoma Park, MD, the organization had a DC-based address in 2009. Its editor appears to have held the position of General Counsel for the Corporation for National and Community Service, but his name no longer appears on the group's website.

I don't want you to think I'm cueing some ominous music to explain an Islamist group's maniacal plot to take over the US legal system. I have no analytical opinion on the issue of various Islamist plot and plans for domination -- they're so numerous they should count as their own genre. However, I do find the ideas expressed in this article, and in other articles from the same journal, to be fascinating. They provide a window into a "mainstream" American Islamist's mindset and intent long before September 11th altered the playing field for everyone.

January 26, 2011

Little did I know that deleting the BestofthePest from my Box.net directory would cause such a fuss. I received four requests from four different academics in the past two weeks asking me to restore the files. Unprecedented for this blog. Honest, I didn't even know that many people read it!

The study of online radicalization is very much the fad in academic circles right now, and as a service to my academic readers who have theses to write and crappy undergrad essays to grade, I am reposting BestofthePest.

However, I am also posting the directories from several other blogs that were active in 2007 and 2008. The first is http://www.forpeopleofunderstanding.blogspot.com/. Mostly active in 2007 and 2008, this appeared to be an online jihadi who was/is located in New Jersey.

Also in the collection: an archive of Tarek Mehanna's wordpress blog, iskandrani.wordpress.com. Mehanna is a former Boston blogger arrested in October 2009.

There is also an archive of jihadi files associated with muslimpad.com hosting site, unavailable as if this writing. This is mostly Samir Khan's (aka The Pest) works when his blog was hosted at muslimpad.

And then there are two collections of files associated with The Pest's web content. Some of these files are copies, no doubt, but I am making it all available just in case there's value in the total:

Please don't stop with my work, folks. There's plenty to grab and analyze still out there. Archives exist of many salafi/salafi-jihadi blogs that came and went with their creator's enthusiasm. I found this one tonight -- Islam is the Sunnah and the Sunnah is Islam. My eagle eyes apparently missed this one when it was active in 2007-08. While there, check out the links on the right. Mexico City? Really? I had a "senior security advisor" recently tell me that there were no Salafists in Mexico.

January 19, 2011

The Emerson Begolly IM transcripts (and other evidence) submitted into the court record on 13 January, is an excellent, if incomplete, picture of the online habits of contemporary American self-radicalized jihadis. The transcripts have provided Rusty with sublime consumation of his endless years of online toil. On the other hand, Jarret points out how Begolly exploits a harmless redneck teen video as a learning experience for future terrorist plots.

The part that caught my eye comes somewhere in the middle of an 28 October 2010 IM session. Begolly, using the ID "abunancy@almanhajribat.net" mentions the audio collection I profiled here last week: Azzam Publication's In the Hearts of Green Birds.

What's equally interesting is how Begolly picked up on the cues and details so common in jihadi media, like his comment on the "smiling shaheeds." It's common to find death mask images of dead jihadis in videos and still images. It's clear that Begolly believed it and took it to heart.

September 11, 2010

Since everyone's favorite online ehadi has gone on to bigger and better things, I thought about sharing some of The Pest's past works with you. It's a directory of blog posts (from "inshallahshaheed") that I grabbed over the years, as the little one grew into full ehadihood. Whether we like it or not, Samir Khan's work was pioneering and pivotal in the early development of an American Salafi-jihadi community. This, despite the fact that it was mostly produced in his parent's basement.

I hope this helps any researchers out there who are exploring this early period (2006-2008).

August 14, 2010

Back in 2004 the InfoVlad Clearinghouse was perhaps the only English-language online forum where users could share and discover jihadi media. It was a modest operation in comparison to the mega jihadi forums, all in Arabic, directed by the London jihadi frontgroups. Those forums were probably the most spooked-out websites on earth, and inhospitable places for non-Arabic speakers.

I was an "active" lurker on Infovlad. I posted a few comments; nothing memorable. However, I do remember one "graduate" going on to set up the Anti-Imperialist Forum (AIF). I also wonder whether the "Bilal" on the forum was the "Bilal" recently arrested in Alaska. Now I wonder if the Pest and some of his other friends weren't making their first forays into the virtual jihad on the Clearinghouse.

This may seem like "ancient" history to some. After all, the Pest has gone on to bigger and better things. "Bilal" is cooperating with authorities. And the Clearinghouse is no more. But accurate timelines do matter, particularly in dynamic environments like the US's virtual jihadi community. Incomplete or misdirected analysis now could create dramatically inaccurate pictures five or ten years down the analytical road. America's online jihadi community -- a center of media attention at the moment -- has a few starting points, and I am beginning to believe that the Clearinghouse was one of them.

July 05, 2008

Despite the best efforts of the local ACLU branch and other anti-American groups, Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain (aka the Moussed Mujahideen*), will remain behind bars:

The U.S Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the convictions of Yassin Aref, 37, and Mohammed Hossain, 53, who were sentenced last year to 15 years each in prison for their roles in a fake plot to attack the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations in New York with a missile.

Both appealed their convictions of money-laundering and conspiring to provide material support to the Pakistan-based Islamic militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed, which is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.

The federal appeals court rejected all the defense's arguments, including that the men did not know missiles were involved.

"The evidence sufficed for a jury to conclude that Aref intended to aid in preparing a missile attack on American soil," the ruling said, concluding the same for Hossain.

During the 2006 trial, the two were found to have laundered $50,000 from an FBI informant who said he worked for the militant group.

*Why are they "moussed"? At the time of their arrest, both men were wearing the traditional Salafist beards and flowing robes. In the interim between arrest and trial, someone advised a more, er, western look: trimmed beards, suits, and well-coiffed hair.

June 08, 2008

In brief, the panel unanimously rejected a variety of challenges to the conviction (including his claims that statements made to Saudi interrogators should have been suppressed and that his Confrontation Clause rights were violated by the use of video to permit Saudi officials to testify from abroad), and by a 2-1 majority remands the case for resentencing (in the government’s favor).

Ouch. My guess is that Mr. Ali's lawyers are drafting a "Cert" right now.

May 14, 2008

Someone dropped a potent clue-pill in the water-cooler at New York Review of Books (NYRB), because they've recently published some excellent surveys of books on Islam and radical Islam. For readers who might not have the knowledge of obscure American journals, NYRB has been regularly left of some of the most reliable leftist media outlets in the United States. It is very left.

However, Malise Ruthven's work surveying current books and ideas in the world of radical Islam is worth reading if only because of his informed and dispassionate insights into books you may be unfamiliar with, like:

NEFA Foundation has a new video report on the ongoing investigations into the 7/7 attack. Like 9-11 or 3-11, 7-7 exposed the Gordian knot of connections and associations that are so common among large-scale CT investigations.

May 12, 2008

The Nine-Eleven Finding Answers (NEFA) Foundation's website gets better by the week. It's one of the best sources for primary source material on the web. If you're curious about what the radical Islamists really say, there's plenty to keep you busy there.

January 11, 2008

Prosecutors said the men failed to disclose that Care was a successor to the Boston branch of the Al-Kifah Refugee Center in New York, which was linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The center was a recruitment office for Mektab al Khidmat, which Osama bin Laden co-founded in the 1980s to recruit mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, according to the 9-11 Commission.

What? You say you never heard of the case against three former officers of Care International? Suspected of helping support the development of Al Qaeda's early Afghan operations? Of course, you didn't hear about this case, because it had practically no coverage.

January 06, 2008

Sometimes prison authorities separate charged and convicted terrorists from the general population, because being a terrorist (even if only a suspected one) is second only to being a child rapist priest in the level of disdain expressed by fellow inmates.

But perhaps we should grant Mr. Alishtari his wish and let him reside with the prison's general population. I'm sure he could convince his fellow cell mates (many of whom tend to be, let's just say, patriotic) that he isn't as bad as the other terrorists awaiting trial, and that they really should use KY if they got it.

October 16, 2007

I've blogged several times about the docs on my MSJ resource page. I'm also upfront about the page. It's intended for the good guys. Bad guys can use it, but they must understand that I will share that information. As part of my effort to make transparent some of the data collected at my site, I'm listing the "IPs" that downloaded Fahd's (and Al Qaeda's) WMD fatwa, "A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction against Infidels" in the months of July, August, September.

September 06, 2007

Every girl has a first time, and I will always remember my very first death threat. It came from a reader of that once-reliable loci of evil, the WordPress blog Ignored Puzzle of Knowledge, aka Inshallahshaheed.

LGF reports it's down, and if the Jawa Report and Counterterrorism Blog are correct, it was the authorities who may have had a role in its demise, because it linked to a media (audio) threat of a "special gift" coming on September 11th. If Howie is right, then the fine gentleman who runs it actually "wussed" out and deleted the blog. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

The camel in the room, of course, is perfectly visible in the screen cap at Jawa Report: that ever-reliable free jihadi file hosting site -- Archive - dot - org. Mr. Inshallahshaheed may have linked to it, but the hippies at Archive are still hosting it.

June 17, 2007

Ismail Royer, the American Islamist who plead guilty to criminal charges related to his activities in the Virginia Jihad Network, appears to have asked a compatriot to pass on a letter he wrote to a "brother." I won't link to the original post (because the blogger is an Islamist), but you can copy and paste the URL in order to read it for yourself. You may be surprised:http://umarlee.com/2007/06/17/letter-from-ismail-royer-to-a-brother/

You raise some interesting points in your letter. I’ll begin by saying, it’s very heartening to hear of a Muslim majoring in English, which is really an aspect of the study of the soul of man. Walt Whitman said, “Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion & growth of every dialect, race & range of time, and is the culling & composition of all. From this point of view, it stands for Language in the largest sense, & is really the greatest of all studies.” This sounds politically incorrect now, but there’s a lot of truth in it - excepting, of course, classical Arabic’s role as the master key to our religion.

I realize most of that is not originally English. They are some of my favorite examples. And beyond them, if you read any of the good writers writing from the early to mid 1800’s to the early 1900’s (i.e. Dickens, James), you will gain insight into how society was beginning to change.

Too much 19th century literature on the list. His thinking shows the influence of that glorious and depressing age; there's the cynicism of modernity, and the despair of its lukewarm Deism.

He ends with this flourish:

Modern man’s distance from God, & its effect on the individual soul & society, was also a central theme of Dostoevsky. He wrote in Crime & Punishment of a young man, a political radical who commits a horrible crime, his “heart unhinged by theories”. In Brothers Karamazov, he wrote: “Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, & the roots of our thoughts & feedings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from the other worlds & sowed them on this earth, & raised up his garden, & everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives & grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, & even come to hate it.”

You asked about how the existentialists’ thought has influenced the modern world, & I would say not much. They recorded their observations & we continued on our course. (An exception may be Nietzsche, who may have hurried us along.) What we must do now, in the Age of Despair, is study these authors to become intimately familiar with ourselves & modern man. I believe this is much more fruitful, from the point of view of “fiqh al-waaqia,” then obsessing over distorted “shadows on the wall” cranked out by the news media.

How many Royers are being made in our humanities departments? Where they train students to recognize despair, but not to declare beauty. Perhaps a little more Chaucer and Wordsworth and a lot less Nietzsche would have helped guide Royer on a path different from the one he chose, one that was leading him to fight against fellow Americans in Afghanistan.

-----------------------BTW: Here's an old blogspot blog that carries the his name. Was it his? I have no idea.

June 05, 2007

Crossroads Arabia notes the trend in "homegrown" imams in the US. The truth is many imams come from overseas, particularly from academies funded through or even located in Persian Gulf countries:

Foreign imams, who tend to be brought in to provide a professional level of religious guidance, are not at all attuned to American society. They are, as a result, seen as disengaged or irrelevant. Instead of reasoned argument, the piece quotes a specialist in Islamic Law at UCLA, they engage in ‘hadith slinging’, justifying a particular point of view with one hadith only to be countered by another imam offering his favorite hadith.

An interesting side note: The imam who is featured in the story, Sheik Yassir Fazaga, is a product of Saudi religious education at the ‘Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America, a Virginia campus of al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh.’

January 07, 2007

News came this week that Fawaz Damra has been mailed back to the Palestinian Territories where he will no doubt be welcomed with opened arms:

The deportation order was carried out Thursday, said Tim Counts, spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Damra was flown to Amman, Jordan, and then crossed the Allenby Bridge to the West Bank.

Bill West at Counterterrorism Blog is happy. He should be. It's nice to see hard work of the good guys finally come to fruition. As a senior agent at the INS (now ICE) in Miami, he initiated criminal investigations into the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) cell then lead by Sami al-Arian and including Damra. However, I'm not going to do a Snoopy Dance for this success story, because quite frankly, it's not much of a victory.

Nailing Imam Damra and (finally) punishing him took enormous law enforcement and prosecutorial resources, and for what? Unless he's in an Israeli prison right now, he's going to return to his terrorist ways. He hasn't stopped being a senior PIJ leader, he's just stopped being a US-based PIJ leader. Meanwhile, mainstream media and CAIR have successfully framed Damra's case as a moderate imam and community leader who was wrongfully deported because of a few unfortunate statements he made long ago.

Describing Damra as an "interfaith" leader, the single AP report on the case ignores all-together the terrorist part of the guy's career. However, AP does report straight on an associate's paranoid, anti-Semitic accusation that it was the "pro-Israel lobby" that brought Imam Damra to the Allenby Bridge:

He immigrated to the United States in the mid-1980s and is married with three U.S.-born children.

Damra's lawyer, Michael Birach, said the imam was a bridge-builder and a healer who made a real contribution to religious understanding in the Cleveland area. He called Damra a victim of federal officials who wanted to look tough after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"He was just a poster boy for the war on terrorism," Birach said.

In Ohio, Damra became involved in interfaith activities, particularly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. But soon after, a tape of a 1991 speech in Chicago became public in which Damra said Muslims should be "directing all the rifles at the first and last enemy of the Islamic nation and that is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews."

He apologized and said he made the remarks before he had any interaction with Christians and Jews.

Haider Alawan, a friend of Damra's and a member of the Islamic Center of Cleveland's council of elders, blamed Damra's conviction on the pro-Israel lobby's influence of the federal government.

Apparently there's no motivating circumstance that would require original reporting, because no other news agency has produced an article about Damra's deportation. The only report I see originates from the AP. However, reading the AP report you would never know that Damra's entire American career was dedicated to furthering the causes of radical Sunni Islam at home and abroad. In his new book Steve Emerson writes of Damra (pg 254):

Damrah's radical activity in the United States began while he was living in Brooklyn..While residing in Brooklyn, Damrah was affiliated with the Al Kifah Refugee Center... Damrah also served as the spiritual leader of the Al Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, an institution frequented by conspirators who were implicated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Damrah himself was later implicated as an unindicted coconspirator in this devastating attack. In addition...Damrah is also identified as Unindicted Coconspirator One in the indictment against Sami al-Arian, as a result of fund-raising efforts on behalf of [Islamic Committee for Palestine]. [Note: links are mine]

According to Emerson, Sami al-Arian established the Islamic Committee for Palestine as a fund raising front for PIJ. Bill West and his FBI counterparts began investigating al-Arian, Damra, and others in the mid-90s. Damra was finally was arrested in 2002, and convicted in 2004. He then lingered in the US while the government tried to find some country somewhere willing to take him. Ten years dedicated to neutralizing this joker in the US, but there is no guarantee he won't be operating soon out of Nablus or even Damascus.

Bill West is justified in his job well done. For him it was years upon years of tedious paperwork, endless Powerpoint briefings, clueless bosses, investigative deadends, piss-poor technology, link charts, memos, meetings, and funding scares. All to have this man deported out of the country. But ten years, Bill? Do you really believe this is the best way to fight radical Islamists in the US? Permit them to freely operate for years -- raising money, gathering acolytes -- while you gather enough evidence to convict them of...immigration fraud? Let them linger in prison for years while they gain local and national support from increasingly radicalized "civil rights" groups?

Unless the Israeli's or Jordanians snatched him up, Damra is sitting in a relative's living room in the West Bank right now getting reacquainted with PIJ leadership:

ICE officials said they do not know where in the West Bank Damra might be. Damra has family in Nablus, but Muslim civic leaders in Cleveland said on Friday that no one on either side of the ocean had heard from him.

All arrangements for Damra's deportation were worked out with officials from the Palestinian Authority, not Israel, said Counts, the ICE spokesman. He said Damra was turned over to Palestinian officials after crossing the Allenby Bridge that links Jordan and the West Bank.

But that bridge, called the Al-Karameh Bridge by Palestinians, is controlled by the Israelis, noted Julia Shearson, director of the Cleveland office of CAIR.

December 06, 2006

In the newest issue of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, Lorenzo Vidino has a remarkable study of the history and current strategy of Muslim Brotherhood front groups in Europe, including one of the best descriptions of the Sheik Qaradawi's role and influence within the European Ihkwan:

Qaradawi sees the lack of Muslim leadership not only as a problem, however. He also views it as an unprecedented opportunity for the Islamist movement to “play the role of the missing leadership of the Muslim Nation with all its trends and groups.” While the revivalist movement can exercise only limited influence in Muslim countries, where hostile regimes keep it in check, Qaradawi realizes that it is able to operate freely in the democratic West. Muslim expatriates disoriented by life in non-Muslim communities and often lacking the most basic knowledge about Islam, moreover, represent an ideally receptive audience for the movement’s propaganda. Qaradawi asserts that revivalists need to take on an activist role in the West, claiming that “it is the duty of [the] Islamic Movement not to leave these expatriates to be swept by the whirlpool of the materialistic trend that prevails in the West.”

Having affirmed the necessity of the Islamist movement in the West, Qaradawi proceeds to present a plan of operation. The Egyptian-born scholar openly calls for the creation of a separate society for Muslims within the West. While he highlights the importance of keeping open a dialogue with non-Muslims, he advocates the establishment of Muslim communities with “their own religious, educational and recreational establishments.” He urges his fellow revivalists to try “to have your small society within the larger society” and “your own ‘Muslim ghetto.’”

October 01, 2006

Please read Steven Emerson’s September 20, 2006 Congressional testimony, "The Homeland Security Implications of Radicalization." It is a concise summary of the process and fruits of radicalization here in the US. It includes excellent open source summaries of US-based cases, including the Lackawanna Six, the Virginia Jihad Network, Abu Ali, and of course, Adam Gadahn:

Adam Gadahn, a convert to Islam, grew up on a farm in California. He was born Adam Pearlman to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father who later converted to Christianity, taking the name Gadahn. As a young man, he was interested in death-metal music and hosted a show on the environment on a student television station. In 1997, at the age of 17, he converted to Islam under the tutelage of a purportedly moderate religious leader named Haitham "Danny" Bundakji and was hired as a security guard at the Islamic Society of Orange County. Bundakji claimed that Gadahn was then befriended by a group of Pakistani nationals he described as “fundamentalist” who were outspoken in their criticism of moderation and Bundakji’s interfaith activities, calling him “Danny the Jew.” One of the group was Hisham Diab, a well-connected al Qaeda operative who once hosted the blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman at his home. After Bundakji banned these men from the mosque, Gadahn stormed angrily into Bundakji’s office, slapped him in the face, and accused him of not being a true Muslim. Shortly after this incident, Gadahn left for Pakistan and kept in touch with his family only occasionally.

And there’s this excellent synopsis of the Internet’s role in the global jihad:

The U.S. led invasion of Afghanistan in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001 forced an historically and strategically significant shift on the part of al Qaeda that reverberated throughout the larger jihadi movement. The successful invasion decimated the hierarchy and configuration of al Qaeda, which was centralized in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda was forced to devolve to an ideological presence and surrender the greater portion of operational control outward to various affiliate groups. While these affiliate groups continued to direct jihad around the world, the ideology of al Qaeda continued to spread and led to the formation of various provisional cells, several of which have been homegrown. Instead of a centralized organization, al Qaeda has become a franchised idea. While many prominent jihadist thinkers agitated over the circumstances that forced this strategic shift, some – such as Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, popularly known as Abu Musab al-Suri – had promoted the strategic necessity of this change for the wider Salafi jihadist movement for some time.

Emerson writes with the confidence and precision that comes with knowing the subject better than practically anyone else inside or outside the intelligence community. In a few pages he crystallizes the nature and scope of the threat.

September 23, 2006

Who knew? Well, several months back I had come across an article Alexander Russell (Mohammed) Webb wrote for Current Literature in 1893. It's a conversion story, not unlike Adam Gadahn's. Though written in a late-Victorian idiom, its supremacist declarations and defensive tone are instantly recognizable:

As soon as I reached maturity I began the study of the various religions, and of the mysteries of life and death. The possession of some knowledge created a thirst for more. Desiring to personally investigate the workings of the Mohammedan religion, I secured, through the kindness of President Cleveland, in 1885, the Consulship of Manila, in the Philippine Islands. The little time I had to spare outside my official duties I spent in the pursuit of further enlightenment. There could be but one result. My investigations made me a thorough Mussulman.

Why? Because I found the morals of the followers of Allah were better than those of the people of our own Christian America. Because there is nothing about the traditions or precepts of Mohammedanism incapable of proof. Because its higher philosophy is the most perfect in the world. Because there is nothing of superstition, bigotry or intolerance about it. And because I believe it can accomplish in America what Christianity has so long attempted and so signally failed in doing. I am here to teach its beauties, its philosophy, and its salvation.

I am often asked who furnishes the money to carry on this work in America. There are rich and devout Mohammedans as well as rich and devout Christians. Wealthy Indian merchants have pledged themselves to support the mission for a period of five years. At the end of that time I have no doubt but that funds for the future will be forthcoming.

Other excerpts....

The four months I spent in Indian form the pleasantest memory of my life. I lived among Mohammedans all of this time. I found a richer, better, higher civilization among these so-called "barbarians" than I can find in the great metropolis of the new world to-day...

One has no right to condemn what he does not understand. However many of those who have called me an "audacious fanatic" because I believe in the Koran, have ever read the Koran? How many of those who condemn its followers as "barbarians" have ever met or converse with an intelligent Mohammedan? We of the West judge Mohammedanism by the Arabians of the desert. Mohammedanism satisfies the soul; Christianity does not. But I will not burden you with missionary pleading...

Far from being a new phenomenon, Islam has survived and thrived in the US for more than a century (and that's a good thing). We need to look deep into our past, deeper than the 1960s in order to build a better understanding and a more accurate picture of Islam in America. Without a better view of the "threat landscape," we'll continue to stumble.

Homegrown terrorism poses a challenge to law enforcement because the individuals in the plots, prior to their radicalization, have not necessarily shown any evidence of extremist views, much less any connection to terrorist activity. They appear to lead normal lives, at times even after indoctrination into an extremist ideology. The examples to be presented demonstrate that there are several underlying similarities characterizing homegrown terrorism.

<SNIP>

The majority of these radicalized individuals who become involved in such plots are below the age of 30 and are often times radicalized in private study circles or by individuals they meet at their place of worship. In several instances, an older and charismatic imam or spiritual leader is involved such as Ali Al-Timimi or Juma al-Dosari in the U.S., and in the case of the Toronto plot, by Qayyum Abdul Jamal, a 43-year-old mosque volunteer from suburban Toronto. These homegrown jihadists are often well-integrated into Western society and many were students at American universities.

Certain domestic radical Islamic civil society groups engender radicalization through spreading a false sense of persecution and alienation in the Muslim community in the West, labeling the war on terrorism as a war on Islam. These conspiratorial allegations facilitate and maintain indigenous Islamic alienation from host governments, reinforce loyalty to the larger Muslim ummah, and in some cases rationalize acts of terrorism. In nearly all of the post-9/11 terrorist plots, unsuccessful and successful, the perpetrators have claimed that they are only avenging crimes committed by the West against Muslims.

The strategic penetration operated by the Jihadists before and since 9/11 is based on three models: One are the Jihadists who originates overseas and move to the United States, either legally (visa, lawful immigration, marriage, political asylum) or illegally. In either of these cases the Jihadis ends up operating on the inside of the country, using its laws and facilities. The estimate of Jihadists who have infiltrated the country over the past two decades is certainly in the hundreds, possibly close to a thousand. This "first generation" Jihadists has organized itself to perform two activities: One is to grow its own strength for "future Jihads." Two is to *produce the second generation of American-born Jihadists.

I would like to briefly examine the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation’s connections to international terrorism in order to demonstrate the charity’s ideological orientation. Ultimately, the story of Al Haramain’s dawa program is one of missed opportunities for the charity and its terrorist backers. The program was set up in such a way that it could have been used as a major vehicle for terrorist recruitment. The program was not used in that way. But Al Haramain’s connections to terrorism mean that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that the prison dawa program might be used in that manner.